This is a terrific article by Crowell and Moring’s Paul Haskel on the use of alternative fee arrangements, particularly contingency fee arrangements, by large law firms to supplement the revenue generated by traditional billable hour defense work. The author makes three points: first, that large firms have been doing this for years but it is
Attorney fee awards under ERISA loom larger in the imagination of lawyers and, to the extent they note it at all, the public than they do in the real world. It’s likely due to the outsize coverage that the occasional very large fee award, usually entered as part of a class action settlement, receives in
Twenty years or so ago, I represented an insurer in a $20 million insurance bad faith and Chapter 93A claim in which one of the key issues was whether the insurer was right to rely on the advice of a terrific lawyer, Tom Burns (the Burns in the Boston firm Burns and Levinson), who had
Wow, this is fascinating. The “this” in question is an interesting little twist in litigation over an attorney fee award to plaintiff’s counsel in the long running ERISA litigation, Frommert v. Conkright. Attorney fee awards in ERISA litigation are a fascinating sub-issue in and of itself, for a number of reasons. First, it is
I have been writing a lot recently about big picture items, from Supreme Court cases over ERISA’s statute of limitations to the ability of plan sponsors to legally control litigation against them, and everything in between. It is worth remembering, however, that ERISA is a nuts and bolts statute that is litigated day in and
I wanted to comment at least briefly, or more accurately thematically, on the Third Circuit’s decision last week in Santomenno v. John Hancock, in which the Court held that John Hancock’s role as an advisor and service provider for a company 401(k) plan, by which it helped select fund options and administer participant investments
I have been tied up on trial out of state most of January, and am now starting to go back over the more interesting items that landed in my in-box during that time. One of my favorites is this Supreme Court decision in an ERISA case, which essentially holds that a party cannot wait for
Here is a neat little story that illustrates a bigger point. The article describes the resolution of a Department of Labor lawsuit brought against a small company to recover approximately $100,000 of participant holdings in a profit sharing plan that was diverted to other uses. Its own moral is clear – plan sponsors need to
I have to admit I have never been to Oklahoma. I am not, however, afflicted with the New Yorker’s view of the world and do in fact know where Oklahoma is on a map (I have also been to states that border it, if that counts). Either way though, the next time you have to
Well, everybody and their mother’s lawyer has an article, blog post or client advisory memo out on the Hardt case, and I suspect that is because, frankly, its about as easy a Supreme Court decision to understand as you can find. What’s it hold? Procedural victory requiring remand of an ERISA denied benefit claim is